Assessment Journals

Open-Ended Assessment
Questions are considered open ended when there are multiple ways to solve it as well as multiple correct answers. Creating these types of problems is time consuming and often difficult. These questions are much more difficult to come up with. You have to be sure when creating these problems that the students will understand what the question is and that they need to show how they came up with their solution. Implementing these questions on assessments in my classroom would allow for me to gain a better understanding of where the students are at in their understandings of the topics.

Assessment Options
There are many different types of assessments for teachers to choose from. Assessments are designed to help students learn as well as to help teachers to see what the students are understanding. Assessments should be chosen specifically to evaluate students on each topic. Using the same type of assessment over and over is not useful to the students or the teacher. By using different types all of the time, the students will be able to demonstrate their strengths in different areas and the teacher will be able to get a clearer picture of the students' current performance levels.

Understanding Student to Open-Ended
This article focused on several different student responses to the same question. Their responses showed that the students who were in sixth grade were able to thoroughly explain their processes in writing. The responses also give the teacher a great understanding of how the students are working through the problems. Asking for an explanation of how the students found their answer is a great idea. I think that this will even help the students, because they may notice that something does not quite make sense when they are writing their explanations, which gives them a chance to go back and make adjustments.

Conversations
This article starts out with a great example of why classroom discussions are valuable. The students are answering questions aloud which lets the teacher know that some of her students are confused about a topic before the one which they are currently working on. This allows for the teacher to go back and clarify that basic topic and then continue to move on. Conversations in the classroom can be helpful in directing instruction. The teacher can listen to how students explain various topics to see where they need the most help.

 Portfolio Assessment
When I think of portfolios, I think of something that shows growth and development. After reading this article, I realize that there are more things to look for in math portfolios than growth. Students can show their attitude, problem solving skills, growth, writing, and connections all in a portfolio. Portfolios can be assessed based on their organization as well as the math content within them. I think that portfolios are a great assessment tool which can be shown to future teachers to help understand the levels of their new students. This is also a great thing to show to parents so that they can see the growth as well.